


Red Jacket

by suzteel



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:01:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25750051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzteel/pseuds/suzteel
Summary: Rosa finds a familiar piece of clothing in a thrift store. Written for Ladies of RNM Week 2020.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 12





	Red Jacket

She finds it in a thrift shop in Albuquerque. Kyle had a medical conference he was attending and had invited her along. He said it was a chance to do some sibling bonding, but she knows he’s just trying to look out for her with Liz in California and Rosa so freshly out of rehab. It’s both sweet and irritating, but it’s a break from her father’s constant smothering—made all the more difficult to deal with because he was trying so hard _no_ t to smother her—so she says yes.

It’s been surprisingly nice. At some point the transition from the high school bully Kyle had been to the compassionate man he now was stopped being weird, and he was a good traveling buddy, seeming to know the right balance between being a fun companion and giving her space.

She got a lot of that space while he was working though, and she used the time to wonder the city alone. While the Albuquerque art scene may not be as good as Santa Fe’s, it was a far cry better than Roswell’s, and Rosa spent much of her time in art museums and galleries and the occasional thrift shop that appealed to her sensibilities.

Which is how she found herself in this particular shop staring at her red jacket.

It wasn’t actually hers, obviously. Hers had burned along with the rest of her ten years ago. It was the same make and model though, same color, and she recognized it instantly. She’d been alive again for almost a year now, but still the things that were familiar stood out as starkly as the things that weren’t.

She pulled it off the rack, running her hands over the familiar fabric. It was in good condition for its age, which of course is probably how it made its way onto this particular sales rack. The color was faded only slightly, the faux leather worn in a few spots but hadn’t started to fray, and it had some discrete stitching along the left seam of inner lining, but it was still very serviceable. Rosa knew her own jacket wouldn’t have lasted this long had she lived. Whoever had owned this jacket previously hadn’t worn it into battle the way Rosa had.

And she had worn it into battle many times.

Her mother had hated it, which of course meant it had been one of her favorite pieces of armor to wear around her. It had been the natural choice on the day she told her mother to leave town and never come back.

She’d worn it around Arturo sometimes too, though more by chance, him being as much a victim of Rosa’s anger at other people—her mom, herself, the rest of the town—as the cause of it. Same with Liz, though most of the time she’d just wanted to show her little sister how important it was that she protect herself. Liz was going to do brilliant things— _had_ done brilliant things—but back then she had a soft heart in need of guarding.

It had been a fateful coincidence that she’d been wearing the jacket on the day she confronted Jim Valenti about being her bio dad, barely a week after her mom left. Rosa had seen him on the street and immediately knew Helena had told him that she knew. It had served as her armor too on the day she’d accepted his offer to help her get clean, after finally telling Frederico she never wanted to see him, or his drugs, ever again.

She also wore it on the day she died.

On the day it failed to protect her from both herself and a monster in disguise, preying on the already broken.

Standing in a Albuquerque thrift store ten years and some 200 miles away from that day, she slipped jacket on, feeling the familiar weight settle on her shoulders, worn fabric molding to her body. It was her size, a perfect fit, and for a moment, she felt the familiar comforting embrace of her old armor.

The feeling didn’t last. Instead, as she stood there, she felt something like an itch, like skin needing to be shed. 

It was a feeling she was slowly growing accustomed to, having experienced it more than once since her return. The Rosa who had worn this armor was gone. Not dead however, that was something important she had figured out. She had a new body, new powers, but her essence, her _soul_ , was the same. She was still Rosa Ortecho. She had merely shed an old skin to make room for the one growing underneath.

This jacket was old skin. She had new battles to fight now. She needed a different kind of armor.

She ran her hands along the fabric once more, before taking it off and putting it back on the rack. Kyle would be getting done soon, and he’d promised to take her to one of the local restaurants that the tourists hadn’t discovered en masse yet. She didn’t want to make him wait and worry.

And she didn’t look back as she left.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Red Jacket](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26918806) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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